Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

During the last two years I had the pleasure of participating in a team that built a new engineering center for EMC in Beer Sheva.

Beer Sheva is only 116.5 kilometers from Tel Aviv, but had five Hi-Tech companies , compared with around 3,000 in the greater tel Aviv area.

The beginning was not easy. There are 500 graduates from Ben Gurion University who are potential software developers. However, because of the lack of employment, many relocate to Tel Aviv after graduation.

This was a Catch-22 problem. Without potential employees, there are no Hi-Tech companies and without Hi-Tech companies there would be no employees.

To break this cycle, EMC and the Israeli government have decided to create a plan to change the momentum . The idea is to create a great innovation center, that would allow smart, motivated employees to generate a great product in the south of Israel.

Temporary Office

There were quite a few challenges to deal with :

* Lack of the common infrastructure that exists in the center of Israel.For example, recruiting companies, IT professionals, catering services a training.

* Missile attacks 😦 . We had probably one of the very few software development centers in the world that had a missile attack targeted at their city every 4-6 months.

An interesting anecdote is that our employees actually felt they have the best physical security in all of the global offices.

* A relatively small pool of mid level and senior level managers.

First Aid Training

The reason for success lies first and for most in the great employees we recruited and the support of the University, the local Mayor and EMC headquarters.

The employees in Beer Sheva created a great sense of community and belonging from the very beginning.

Employees

Our strategy , unlike previous “outsourcing” concepts, was to treat the center equally to the main office in “Herzelia“.

We offered the same high profile projects and set the same high bar for recruiting, but also offered similar compensation.

The results were wonderful : an amazing acceptance rate for job offers, very fast recruiting and motivated top talent showing fast results.

With the assistance of local community leaders were able to promote a Hi-Tech environment around us as well:

Product Manager – Backgammon, Company unspecified, Gibraltar

The world’s leading online gaming company, requires an innovative Product Manager to own, develop and manage the company’s suite of Backgammon products. This dynamic role will see you developing and owning the product roadmap for Backgammon, generating new product ideas and driving successful product rollouts.

I believe it is a shame when some of the top intellectual minds of our times devote their 12 hours work days to algorithmic trading, on-line gambling, “casual” gaming, search engine optimization , on-line porn, search diversion through “Freeware\Malware” and so on.

Of course, these ultra smart developers are not using these services (at least not all of them:) ). They are the brains that run the software and algorithms to operate the questionable services.

I’m not passing judgment on the need for the services , although I’m quite sure Algo Trading has no economical benefit to the world :). I do think that being a “Product manager for backgammon” is less important and satisfactory than “Product manager for diabetes cure” .

I see too many brilliant friends who want to make easy money by finding a loop-hole in the global financial system. While I can’t commit that I would never work in such company, I prefer not to do it, as long as I can.

Interestingly enough, these services are somewhat related. For example, a lot of the real good money in SEO is from references to gambling and porn sites . Forex trading is not really different from a legal(?) form of gambling and “casual gaming” ,IMO, is quite the same.

It just seems that developing the Google search engine is more productive than algorithms that create fake content that only seems real to Google, but no real person would ever want to read.

Our civilization moves forward from innovation like Bioinformatics and Wikipedia, even Facebook and Twitter. But it seems that we can leave SEO to the average developers….

A Job offer is a beginning of a relationship. The relationship is with the hiring manager and the organization, not with the HR department. Starting a relationship by delegation is wrong.

Money is not a “dirty” thing. Hiring managers should be able to negotiate and understand financial aspects of their work. On one position ,as a candidate, I got the final offer from a relatively junior HR associate. I felt uneasy negotiating with her as “she did not have the power” and it was “unfair” to push her. A company is a for-profit organization.

Hiring managers must be aware of equal opportunity, non discrimination laws and social benefits their employees are entitled to. These are important from ethics perspective and (in good companies) reflect the overall vision and culture of the company.

A Job offer is a selling process. Selling and marketing are key managerial capabilities, in any role.The hiring manager has more credit as he describes his own professional and personal opinion, since he is “hands on”.

This is a great,last opportunity, to set expectations before the commitment. The contract is a (good?) way to define minimum expectations in a legal document. But it is up to the manager to define his expectations for the specific role. “How many hours a day”, “How much travel?”, define “Work Hard”, define “Excellent”.

It is perfectly OK for the HR partner to be present during the offer. It is great if they join the selling process and add their views and authentic opinion. They can also help in training hiring managers on process and assit in the more administrative or professional details. However, the leadership and accountability has to be owned by the manager.

However, there seem to be very few software products companies In non English speaking countries (I count both Canada and Israel as English speaking countries for in this blog context).

Germany has SAP and Software AG. France used to have Business Objects, but now it belongs to SAP so it is left with Dassau. Japan has Trend Micro, but that’s about it. China is not in a much much better situation with total of 29 companies listed in Wikipedia.

I have assembled a pseudo-arbitrary list of interesting Israeli start-ups. These are mostly companies whose product I got to try and whose team I met. Some bias to companies with real intellectual property in algorithms or products. They may have much in common,and there are many more around, but worth watching.

I know a spell
That would make you well
Write about love, it could be in any tense, but it must make sense

Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love

Some companies believe that product management can be reduced to scientific experiments.Instead of using intuition and customers interaction one should run experiments and measure results.

While I have great faith in measurable product management , I think that the dream of product management without the human factor is wrong and dangerous.

Everyone seriously involved in pattern recognition and data mining knows that one can’t just throw tons of raw data into an algorithm and expect to gain (artificial) intelligence.

In most cases it is hard to build a large data set to train the algorithm. Once such data set is built , the raw size is too big for any algorithm to train on. As a result ,the raw data needs to be reduced through feature extraction. For example, if we want to build a face recognition algorithm in a video stream we can help the algorithm by removing the soundtrack. While in theory the soundtrack can add information to the algorithm, we guess it is not very helpful.

The process of feature selection and even dataset selection involved intuition and domain knowledge. This is similar to the generic scientific model.

Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough

But Google’s early success was not just because of the algorithm. The clean UI,text only ads and great performance were crucial. I’m confident it was intuition\product management that led into these decisions. Moreover, the statistics for incoming links from fraud (link farms) are also very high. The algorithms needs “help” on the features that identify fraud.

Google Suggest brings another example. It is a great feature which interactively “guesses” the search term for the end-user.

Robot and Algorithm to Solve Rubic’s Cube (Not the video from youtube which is much newer)

An Internet Terminal connection over RS232

8088 simulator

Russian-Hebrew-English Dictionary

Course-ware for Firefighters

Sound Sampler for IBM PC

An expert system to prove Theorems in Euclidean Geometry

Looking back at the technology is also fun. Lot’s of Robotics, Prolog,”Expert Systems“, EGA, Turbo Pascal and 8088.

It’s true my school was not a standard in the Israeli education system. The principal used to show a map of the Silicon valley superimposed over Tel Aviv back in 1988, in order to present a vision to new candidates. But it was definitely not the only school encouraging technical innovation.

Naturally, I have not stayed in touch with most of the people. Random samples suggests that quite a few are leaders in various positions in Universities and in the Hi-Tech industry.